Optimizing workflows at your quick service restaurant, retail store, or C-store sounds loaded — and can be. Finding the individual keys to an optimized workflow at your business is the key to customers coming back over and over again and a better bottom line — it’s a win win!

So, what do you need to do to ensure you’re optimizing workflows with ease? Let’s break down why this is important and what this looks like for restaurants, retailers, and C-stores.

Why is optimizing workflows at quick service restaurants, retail stores, and convenience stores so important?

Optimizing workflows in quick service restaurants, retail stores, and convenience stores is important for several reasons:

1. Customer Satisfaction:

‍The number one driving force of investing in optimizing workflows is keeping your customers with a positive feeling about your business, with every interaction they have with you. As the saying goes, “happy customers, happy life!” Faster service and shorter wait times lead to happier customers, which can result in increased loyalty and repeat business. Anything you can do to ensure the best possible customer experience will come back to you!

2. Efficiency:

‍Streamlined workflows ensure that tasks are completed faster and with fewer errors, leading to quicker service and improved customer satisfaction. Having a more efficient workflow helps minimize the chance of time theft based on team members not knowing where to spend their labor hours or having too much free time on their hands.
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3. Cost Reductions:

Efficient workflows can help reduce labor and operational costs by maximizing employee productivity and minimizing waste. No more wasting money on overstaffing for the post-breakfast lunch that doesn’t exist, or not bringing in enough people to restock shelves during the holidays.

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4. Consistency:

Standardized processes ensure that customers receive consistent and high-quality service, which is crucial for building a strong brand reputation. If workflows change during every weekend rush, for example, your customers may not receive the same guest experience when they come for their Saturday morning latte. You want to ensure the experience is both positive and predictable.

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5. Inventory Management:

An optimized workflow is instrumental in efficient inventory management. Streamlining processes such as order tracking, restocking, and data analysis reduces the risk of overstocking or understocking, thereby minimizing carrying costs and lost sales opportunities. Furthermore, it improves accuracy, enhances visibility into stock levels, and enables timely decision-making, all of which are crucial for maintaining healthy inventory levels and meeting customer demands.
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6. Employee Productivity:

‍Eliminate inefficiencies and redundancies, allowing employees to focus on tasks that truly matter, increasing their output, with clearly optimized workflows. Clear processes and defined responsibilities also reduce confusion and downtime, ultimately fostering a more productive and motivated workforce.

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7. Adaptability:

Optimized workflows are a business’s agility engine, enabling quick adaptation to changing customer needs. By simplifying decision-making, automating processes, and enhancing resource allocation, they facilitate rapid responses to market shifts. This flexibility allows businesses to pivot and align their products, services, and strategies with evolving customer demands, ultimately ensuring customer satisfaction and sustained competitiveness.

These are just some of the reasons that optimizing workflows at your business is so critical.

Optimizing workflows — what does that look like?

So, what does it look like when you’re optimizing workflows at your business? Let’s look at restaurants, retail stores, and C-stores through the customer’s eyes, and where optimized workflows are going to make the biggest difference with the customer experience.

The key to optimized workflows — seeing what happens

Before diving into what optimizing workflows looks like at restaurants, retail stores, and C-stores, let’s look at how you can capture what’s currently happening — video surveillance.

Having a video surveillance system is a crucial part of assessing and improving workflows within a business. Capturing visual records of various activities allows for the evaluation of processes, revealing inefficiencies, bottlenecks, or deviations from established procedures.

A video surveillance system also helps to ensure safety and compliance by monitoring adherence to safety protocols and regulatory standards. Surveillance cameras can act as a deterrent to security issues, such as theft or vandalism, which may disrupt workflows. In customer-facing areas, video surveillance provides insights into customer interactions, enabling adjustments to workflows for an improved customer experience.

The recorded footage also serves as a valuable training tool when it comes to showing your staff where workflows need to improve. Ultimately, video surveillance offers a true birds-eye-view of how your current workflows are working, meaning you can make data-driven decisions to optimize processes and enhance overall efficiency.

Now let’s dive into what workflows you need to keep an eye on in different industries

Quick service restaurant

Diner enters the queue to order: The queue can make or break your diners’ experience before it even starts. After all, a long wait in store or at the drive-thru has people throwing their cars into reverse and heading to the next quick service restaurant down the street. An optimized workflow is the key to moving the queue quickly, keeping the quick in quick service restaurant.

Diner places order: Efficient order-taking processes, clear menu displays, and speedy order fulfillment reduce waiting times and enhance customer satisfaction. Additionally, well-coordinated workflows help maintain food quality and consistency, ensuring that patrons receive their orders accurately and promptly, resulting in a positive dining experience.

Diner receives food: Streamlined processes, precise communication between kitchen staff and front-of-house, and automated order tracking systems minimize the risk of errors and ensure customers receive exactly what they order. This not only boosts customer confidence but also leads to increased customer satisfaction, as diners can rely on getting the food they want every time they visit.

Day-to-day operations: An area of focus to ensure that you have special eyes on optimizing workflows? Food waste. A poorly optimized workflow in a restaurant or food-related business can significantly contribute to food waste. Inefficient processes, such as inaccurate inventory tracking, slow kitchen preparation, or improper storage, can lead to overordering, spoilage, and excessive portions that often end up as discarded food. A well-designed workflow minimizes these issues, ensuring that food is used efficiently and reducing unnecessary waste, ultimately benefiting both the business’s bottom line and the environment.

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Retail store

Customer enters store: The experience starts for your shoppers right when they enter the store. Is the storefront clean? Is there somebody at the front to greet them? Having workflows that ensure staff are able to clean and manage the front of the store is key to starting off on the right foot.

Customers shopping: Proper workflows can make or break the experience your customers are shopping around. Workflows around customer engagement, restocking the floor so it looks full, and proper communication are key to keeping your staff happy.

Customer cashing out: A bad experience cashing out is not the note you want your shoppers to end on, so reviewing the cash experience is a huge area for proper workflows. Review your busy hours and ensure that you are staffed effectively, to prevent customers from having to search for somebody to cash them out or be stuck waiting in a long line where they can change their mind.

Day-to-day operations: Just like in quick service restaurants, there are so many areas where a well-optimized workflow is important outside of the direct customer experience. With retail stores, having an optimized workflow is critical when it comes to managing loss and retail shrink. A clear and optimial workflow around moving merchandise can be a gamechanger when it comes to minimizing shrink.

Pro tip: You still want to keep your eyes on areas that have a lot of merchandise moving around. Make sure that any security camera placement includes a watchful eye in those areas. This way, you have the footage you need in case you need to review when something happens.

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C-Store

Customer shopping: With a C-store, you have customers entering your store to shop at 2:00AM, 2:00PM, and everything in between. An optimized workflow around staffing, security, and more is key the second somebody steps foot in your C-store. They should be able to get help no matter what time they’re shopping. Make sure your staffing is optimized from the first second. (This includes breaks, especially during later hours. Avoid having one person in-store. If they’re on break, your shoppers are going to be stuck).

Security: Given the hours of operation, having workflows in place that keep your staff and shoppers safe is critical. Implementing security measures, such as surveillance systems, can help deter theft and improve overall customer safety. You can also look at workflows around keeping more high-ticket and higher-risk items secure, like tobacco products, vapes or Juuls, lottery tickets, and more. Maybe this involves locking back doors at certain hours, keeping certain products in the back room, or more. These workflows will keep you and your staff safe.

Continue optimizing workflows

The importance of optimizing workflows for better operations cannot be overstated. Efficient, streamlined processes not only save time and resources but also empower businesses to respond swiftly to market dynamics and customer demands.

By fostering productivity, reducing errors, and enhancing adaptability, optimized workflows serve as the cornerstone of operational excellence, enabling organizations to thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape and deliver the best possible products and services to their customers. Embracing and continuously refining these workflows is the path to sustained success in today’s dynamic business world.

Getting The Most

Integrated Alert & Time Stamped Triggers

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Integrated door triggers have long been a staple of advanced surveillance platforms.

These triggers provide a far superior solution to traditional motion triggers. Hardware-integrated triggers use very similar, if not identical, hardware as well established alarm companies use for their door triggers. This proven technology provides highly accurate results with minimal installation costs. Today, advanced surveillance systems are integrating with much more than simple door triggers. Operational or event driven triggers are providing users with impactful, low cost tools to manage a wide variety of operational procedures. The triggers create an easily reviewable log ensuring compliance that can be quickly inspected for accuracy and consistency. In the past, management was forced to rely on training, handwritten logs, and an employees’ work ethic to ensure proper procedures and tasks were carried out appropriately. The more advanced operational triggers provide a tool to ensure more consistent and auditable results creating a culture of accountability. These triggers can be utilized to manage a wide range of operational needs including, but in no way limited to: delivery check-ins, product waste, cleanliness inspections, time and temperature readings, and food preparation. Following is a discussion of a few of these items and how they can be addressed with door triggers.

Delivery Check-Ins

In the fast-paced world of the restaurant business, it can be challenging to ensure deliveries are properly checked in upon receipt; yet, there are few things more important to a restaurant than ensuring you have an accurate inventory on your food stock. If a manager, or whoever is accountable, becomes busy or distracted, it is easy for them to simply pencil whip the receipt and check-in of a delivery. The impact of running out of an item or items can be devastating. I know that I do not frequent establishments where poor controls lead to unavailable items listed on the menus and I doubt you would either. Using an operational trigger that becomes part of the procedure for checking in a delivery creates an easily auditable time for review of the check-in process. While there may not be a need to audit every delivery, the availability of the information makes it much easier to do so and has the added benefit of reinforcing employee accountability.

Product Waste

Managing waste accurately is an extremely important part of managing food costs in restaurants. Often, handwritten logs are used and management is forced to rely on an employee’s integrity to ensure the log is accurate. Food can be saved for management to track but this can often be unsanitary and simply nasty. With the use of an operational trigger to log each time items are being thrown out, management can review video quickly and easily to ensure it is logged properly. This is also an effective tool for controlling the amount of waste as employees will be more aware that it is being closely monitored.

Temperature Readings

Regular temperature readings are part of every food safety standard. Ensuring this is performed regularly and not simply rubber stamped can be extremely challenging. Whether it is testing food stock with a probe or recording temperatures in holding bins, operational triggers can ensure that these tasks are being performed on a consistent basis. Adding a simple button push to this task will provide an auditable log and easily reviewable task ensuring that management of this critical task is effective without being overly time consuming. Used in conjunction with a waste operational trigger, food placed in a holding bin can be logged and when waste does occur, the waste trigger will be there to track it. This can also be used to ensure that product, which passes the time at which it can or should be safely served is discarded in a timely manner thus, ensuring consistent quality and taste for your customers.

Cleanliness Inspections

The cleanliness of your restaurant is one of the most important first impressions your customers have of your establishment. While you may mandate that employees walk the dining room, lot, and or bathrooms regularly, how do you really ensure this is happening? Utilizing operational triggers to log regular inspections can help ensure that your customers’ first impressions are positive. While we have discussed a few of the many uses of operational triggers, the uses are truly unlimited. Hopefully this gets you thinking about how you can utilize operational triggers in your organization to ensure systematic and auditable compliance throughout your operation.

While speaking with a number of different restaurant operators across the country over the last few months, we’ve noticed a collective fear: rising labor costs. Franchisees turn different shades of red as soon as topics like minimum wages, increasing insurance premiums, and talent pools are broached, and most have no idea how to tackle these issues. Do restaurants pass new cost increases onto the customers? Should they cut employee hours or the number of team members they employ? If you’re facing any of these questions, check out our 7 tips below for balancing growing costs!

1. Pay attention to your sales forecast.

Sales fluctuate from month to month and season to season. Do you keep your scheduling consistent between a barely-there January and a booming June? If so, your business could be stripped of profits extremely quickly. Think ahead and use sales reports from previous months and years to guesstimate gross sales at least 10 days before the start of the upcoming month. You can then adjust employee schedules to accommodate the projected number of guests and business needs. Confirm that a set labor cost percentage is in place so you know exactly how much you can afford to spend on hourly employees after you’ve paid salaried staff.

2. Hire smarter.

Building a high-quality workforce can address escalating costs without risking customers (and can even increase guest visits!). Utilize background checks and consider evaluating candidates via various behavioral assessments during the interview process. While this idea may seem extreme, these evaluations easily reveal prospects who match the core values and goals of your operation. Many operators hire the first person who walks in the door just to fill an open spot on the line, or take on employees based solely on years of experience. If you instead hire on skill, drive, and enthusiasm, these employees will stay engaged with your operation and work harder, better, and faster, driving results directly to your bottom line.

3. Track labor on a daily basis.

Get a clear picture of your labor costs by running daily POS reports to see how many employees were working (keeping in mind how much you’re paying each of them per hour) and what your total sales were. You can also take advantage of remote monitoring tools to keep an eye on front-of-house and drive-thru traffic patterns as well as see how efficiently employees are handling back-of-house responsibilities. By running reports and checking live and recorded video each day, you can efficiently adjust staffing needs, spot performance issues with specific employees, and monitor the effectiveness of any sales promotions.

4. Cross-train employees.

Some operators think it’s more efficient to train certain employees on front-of-house procedures and others on back-of-house duties, rather than allowing staff to learn and work all areas of the business. By cross-training your employees and ensuring that each team member is capable of handling any operational procedure, you won’t run into scheduling headaches when one person is out sick or when someone needs to be cut from a shift on a slow day. Allot time for additional training if necessary to verify that each employee is comfortable at the register, drive-thru window, and various food stations.

5. Leverage loyalty.

Consider implementing a loyalty program to reward your frequent guests. Provide incentives for bounce-back visits via social media, email, or text message, especially during slow periods of the day or week. While you may be hesitant about the cost of a loyalty program, the additional revenue generated by the resultant pickup in sales will overshadow the comparatively slight expense. An effective loyalty program can encourage guests to share their appreciation for your store with friends and family, which in turn can create a cycle of business that’s highly impactful on profits.

6. Size up your menu.

By examining your food options and making small tweaks, a revamped menu can work wonders towards making up for mounting labor costs. This could mean renegotiating with or sourcing new suppliers, reducing portion sizes, or removing higher-priced ingredients. Ensure that there are no menu items slowing down the line – while they may be profitable, foods that are slow to prepare or cook reduce guest satisfaction and overall BOH efficiency by taking up space in the kitchen for an extended period of time. You might also try out a limited-time promotional item, which may help draw renewed interest and traffic to your restaurant.

7. Use small and frequent price changes.

If you know you need to increase pricing, don’t do it all at once. Customers will be confused and unhappy, which can reduce or eliminate their visits altogether. Try increasing prices at just 1-2% to start, then gradually go up again every few months if needed. Monitor your major competitors and ensure your pricing doesn’t skyrocket above market trends. Also keep track of tacit industry price caps for any standard menu items like burgers, sandwiches, and salads. Know that unless your offering is out-of-this-world and totally unique, customers probably won’t pay above the barrier.

With such slim margins industry-wide, business owners are already hawkish in controlling every penny. Costs are changing fast, and owners are forced to adjust budgets on the fly and think carefully about employee pay. Make sure your enterprise is prepared to cover increasing wages without sacrificing revenue or customers!

45% of your shrink is thanks to your employees! *

While the amount and type of internal theft can vary greatly the fact is: if they think they can get away with it, they just might try. Knowing that 75% of all employees have stolen from their employer at one time or another is proof. So stop worrying about the shoplifters and arm yourself with the knowledge and practices to keep your staff motivated, honest and contributing to your bottom line – not hurting it. *

Here are the 7 BEST ways to deter your employees from stealing from you.

1. Policies and Procedures

Handling cash, having store keys and authorizing transactions though the POS system are privileges and responsibilities of your managers. Access to the back room, taking out the trash and a less than secure location are all tempting opportunities to sneak something out. Placing controls around who, when and how these situations should be handled and enforcing them help reduce employees’ opportunities for dishonesty as well as quickly flag if a loss has occurred.

2. Inventory Control / Cycle Counts

Half the battle is awareness. Conducting perpetual inventories and/or cycle counts ensures that your team is aware you’re tracking merchandise inventory and addressing any shortages routinely and quickly. This shows employees that the company has controls in place and losses will be identified in a timely fashion.

* National Retail Federation 2019 Security Survey​

* Forbes.com 2018

3. Camera Systems

Employees are less likely to steal if they know they’re being watched. Place cameras in critical areas that lend themselves to potential theft like cash registers, entrances/exits, stockrooms, cash handling areas. Having a system with remote video monitoring capabilities provides even more of a deterrent by providing visibility into stores on any given day / time.

4. Audit Program

With policies and procedures in place, as mentioned in #1, assessing your team’s compliance with them is critical. Regular audits of compliance to company policies will determine if training opportunities exist. Common areas to audit are operations, inventory control, physical security, cash compliance, and employee awareness. Audits can be conducted on-site or remotely through reviews of surveillance video.  With your teams knowing of and participating in these audits, you are creating an additional deterrent for internal theft.

5. Exception Based Reporting

Tracking transactions doesn’t have to be manual. Let a savvy system like an exception-based reporting tool scan your point of sale and quickly identify possible fraudulent transactions, such as excessive refunds, voids, cancels, deletes and other high-risk transactions. Exception-based reporting systems aren’t only able to identify potential internal theft but also provide a deterrent for employees that are tempted to steal in this manner.

6. Business Abuse / Employee Tip Line

Not all employees are dishonest.  Provide a confidential / anonymous way for employees to report suspicious behavior.  A business abuse line is typically available 24/7 and answered by trained operators.  When your employees feel comfortable having the means to be able to provide information regarding internal theft without feeling they are “telling” on someone they will be more likely to report possible internal theft.  Having a business abuse line that is easily accessible let’s all employees know that if they are doing something wrong it is likely someone will report it.

7. Training and Awareness

Provide employees with training and awareness on shrink and the various ways it occurs.  Educate them on the common day to day procedures that offer the most risk for theft and the policies and procedures in place to ensure theft does not happen.  Employees that are aware of internal theft and how to detect, prevent and report it will deter employees from attempting to steal. A good training and awareness program is an important if not the most important deterrent to internal theft.

While it may seem like common sense to train your employees, have security measures in place and enforce your policies and procedures — the reality is these are challenging to implement with limited resources and busy locations. Let the professionals and technology help, there are limitless tool and systems out there to make your stores smarter and support your existing teams with executing training, audits and more.

Which of the above have you not yet implemented or would you like to do better?

DTiQ with LPI services can help.

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